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The Beginnings: 1838-1850

The Providence Shelter was an actual building from 1838 to 1951, and during these 119 years it housed up to two dozen "children of color" at a time. Since 1951 it has been a foundation granting financial assistance to local agencies which serve children of color. It is one of the longest-lasting charitable organizations in the city of Providence, and one of the oldest in the United States.

The Providence Shelter for Colored Orphans  (the name was changed in 1847, and in spite of frequent discussions, it remains the Providence Shelter for Colored Children to this day) was founded by a group of middle-class white women in 1838.  Quaker Anna Almy Jenkins, granddaughter of leading antislavery activist Moses Brown, opened a small shelter on North Main Street, helped by her daughter Eliza Almy, her friend Elizabeth Congdon and other Providence women .

The 1830s was a period of racial tension in Providence, and as an earlier children's home housed only white children, Mrs Jenkins saw the need for a shelter for "Colored Orphans." Twelve children soon moved in, one of whom was described as "Indian." Very few of the children were, in fact, orphans; most of them had parents who were alive but unable to care for them, and these children were accepted as boarders. Many of the mothers were "living in" servants whose employers did not want a child in the house, and some of the fathers were at sea. These parents paid fifty cents a week, which represented perhaps one third of a female servant's wage at that time.

The parents were looking for adequate child care, while the founders had different ideas: they shared many of the period's views about the children of the poor, who, they believed, needed to be taught how to work and how to behave.  The founders wanted to rescue some "little immortals" from what they described as "scenes of iniquity" and make them good servants (if they were girls) or tradesmen (if they were boys.)

According to the first annual report, the women aimed

"to provide a suitable home where the children might be placed and taught habits of industry, improved in their morals, and instructed in such branches of knowledge as would enable them to procure respectable maintenance, as domestics in families, or to acquire trades adapted to their capacities or inclination."

The Shelter was incorporated in 1846 and moved to larger premises at 11 Wickenden Street. By that time more than one hundred children had been cared for, some for short periods while a family crisis was solved, others for longer periods when a parent was unable to provide for them. During the first decade, however, in spite of the emphasis on vocational training, very few of the children went out to work; instead, most returned to their parents, or, sadly, died of disease in the care of the Shelter.

Anna Jenkins and her daughter perished in a house fire in 1847, but shortly before her tragic death she gave the Shelter a plot of land on Olive Street on Providence's East Side. After some energetic fund raising, a building was erected there, and served as the Shelter for Colored Children for almost one hundred years.

 
 
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The Middle Years 1850-1950

The Shelter employed a Matron who supervised up to twenty-four children.  She was assisted by sixteen volunteer Managers, (all white), and though funds were never plentiful, the Shelter scraped by with the help of donations. In January 1880, for example, they received cake, clothing, sausage meat and a goose, book, barrel of cabbages, a picture, a teapot, apples and oranges, candy, bed ticking, dates, butternuts and cakes.

The Board was closely involved in decisions as to the placement of the children, either in employment or, occasionally, for adoption. They coped with complaints from the neighbors if the children were noisy, and they also put on Christmas parties. The late Addie Mae Meranda, who lived in the Shelter as a child and later served on the Board of Managers, remembered putting on her best dress and having to sing in front of a group of rather grand ladies. The children were then given ice cream.

Changes in child welfare policies in the twentieth century meant a dwindling number of children in the shelter. By the spring of 1940 it was less than half full, with only eleven children housed there. The children were found alternative accommodation and the following year the building was rented to the Children's Friend Society who used it for office space. It was purchased by a physician in 1952; his widow sold it to Brown University in the early 1970s. It now houses graduate students.

In 1941 the Shelter Board hired a black social worker to investigate the needs of children of color in Rhode Island; she also managed the cases of black children under the care of the Children's Friend Society. Although the Shelter no longer had any children under its direct care, it provided Christmas gifts for the forty-two black children supervised by this social worker.

Marion Anderson, the famous operatic singer, visited Providence in 1943 and the Shelter Board arranged for fifteen black children from the State Home and School to attend ”they had front row seats." According to the Shelter minutes, James N. Williams, Executive Director of the Urban League, collected the children in a hearse, and as the war effort meant gas was rationed and vehicles were not supposed to be used for recreational purposes, he drove them to his office and they walked to the concert hall from there.

Black women first started serving on the Shelter Board in the 1940s; people from both the black and the white communities have worked together ever since. There has been an effort, not always successful, to have male Board members.

 
 
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The Shelter Since 1951

The Shelter became a foundation in 1951, and since then we have granted funds to a wide variety of agencies. Initially we gave relatively large sums to a few organizations such as the Urban League, the John Hope Settlement House, Lippitt Hill Tutorial and the Mount Hope Day Care Center. We also gave scholarships to needy students, but after 1969 we discontinued this policy, except in unusual cases, preferring to support programs benefiting a larger number of children.

By the end of the 1970s our policy had shifted to supporting a dozen or more agencies with camperships, after-school programs and the like. A Proposal Review Committee meets each spring to evaluate requests for funding. By the beginning of the twenty-first century we were helping more than thirty agencies each year, with most of the grants being between one thousand and five thousand dollars.

During the 1980s, after a long discussion, the Board adopted a policy of limited divestment of holdings in South Africa in order to protest the apartheid regime. More recently we have adopted a strategy of socially responsible investment, refusing to profit from firearms, gambling or tobacco.

There is a recurring discussion involving the organization's name: so far, the Board has kept it for historic reasons.

Whatever it is called, however, the Providence Shelter has served the needs of children of color in Rhode Island's capital city for almost one hundred and seventy years.

And it plans to go on doing so.